guess we did three horror films for Hallowe'en in the end: the 1979 Frank Langella Dracula, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (which our partner Kaylin always watches on Hallowe'en), and finally Ridley Scott's Alien, which gets me to thinking about colonialist "exploration".
if you grew up with a wh!te American education, as we did, you were taught that colonialists were explorers. more often they were European society's burnouts, the flotsam and jetsam of Western civilization, convincing themselves they could start over somewhere else in a land that was (from their perspective) brand-new, a treasure chest full of wonders and riches, just waiting to be unlocked. they were failed entrepreneurs looking for new territory to exploit, or belligerent folks seeking to build themselves personal empires at gunpoint, or Christian fanatics who convinced themselves that the only way to save humanity was by abandoning it and starting over with a band of handpicked survivors. Christians love the Noah's Ark story so much, they've copied it endlessly. European settlers had a myriad reasons for scattering to every corner of the globe, looking for something or somewhere to grab.
and all of these people, with all their different reasons for prowling around the globe, get to be dignified in Western mythology as "explorers" and "pioneers".
if the only point is to spread, there's no point in sending out the best and brightest–like the hapless crew of Nostromo, anybody will do. the colonial power back home gets to empty its dregs. if the "explorers" get themselves into massive trouble, then their failures furnish the colonial power with valuable information. dead settlers are like an advance warning system, letting future settlers know what dangers are ahead. and maybe they get lucky (you are my lucky star! lucky, lucky, lucky!) and find something valuable to the hegemony.
Western society has never stopped behaving in this fashion. entrepreneurial culture is simply this, this restless zeal for building new kingdoms and grabbing at everything in sight with the hope of extracting money and success, expressed in terms of corporate founders and commercial empires. Internet culture is largely this, except in a "virtual" domain people largely by folks who deliberately try to muddle and minimize the real-world costs of maintaining their virtual spaces, because they wish to pretend as much as possible that the virtual landscapes they're hoping to colonize are infinitely broad and infinitely fruitful. the Elon Musk cult and corporate space-exploration culture generally behaves the same way, only it's "space" they want to think of as an infinitely large treasure-chest.
and as long as Western society stinks, as long as it's disharmonious and perpetually unhappy with itself, the zeal will live on. there'll always be unhappy Westerners who feel obscurely like they've been promised the world, that they've got a destiny to grab, and who consequently will never be happy with where they are and what they have. it's the ultimate survival mechanism for Western civilization: the more rotten it gets, the more "explorers" and "entrepreneurs" it generates.
so, Alien! good movie.
~Chara of Pnictogen
